A songburst from the archives

Some time ago I blogged a little on these spontaneous songs that Iris erupts with, which I call songbursts. One night several years ago I recorded one while we were driving with the video-recording feature on my digital camera. The audio file is pretty big, despite my brother-in-law Craig's best recovery efforts, so I haven't linked to it. But I figured it would be a good audioblog entry to finish off the year 2004, despite an unpleasant automotive hum in the background.

Here are the words Iris sings:

and you too
and you too

it's just grand holding your hand
it's just grand holding my hand

together we howl with the wolves again on a sleigh ride
holding your hand

oh how we are hurtling down the streets with our wolf friends

you know it's grand
just holding your hand together while another
who like...
walk...

you know it's good to be with our wolf friends at our house
you know it's just grand to see a unicorn chase in the waves
just pretty as a wolf can be
just pretty as you can see
yeah

just pretty as you can be
(howling)
those are wolf friends
(small punctuating bark)

Day at the museum

Iris and I spent much of the day at the Museum of Life and Science here in Durham. It's a hands-on science museum with two floors of exhibits, as well as an outdoor animal area. Its jewel, however, is the butterfly house. Here's a shot of Iris and a butterfly:


The best butterflies, in my book, are the paper kites. They are large, zebra-striped butterflies. When they fly they have this way of just gliding, not flapping their wings at all for several aerial feet. Their flight stands out to one's eye even among all the other kinds of butterflies in the place. Here's a paper kite picture:


Iris and I had two objectives for our visit to the museum today: get some butterflies to land on her and shoot a super-8 film together in the storm exhibit room. Right when we arrived we went straight to the storm room, which has several exhibits as well as a few computer kiosks where local television meteorologists take a kid through an info-tour about how thunderstorms form and how lightning works and so forth. We like to play with two exhibits in particular.

The cloud bowl is basically a 6-foot-diameter wok without handles. There are four golf ball-sized holes in the center through which thick steam issues forth. After about a minute the bowl completely fills with turgid curls of cloud. Then the vapor spills over the sides or dissipates above. We like to kneel at opposite sides of the bowl and blow the cloud into each others' faces. Today we shot half a cartridge of film of the water vapor burbling out of the holes and drifting around as Iris blew it from the sides of the bowl. She was in charge of when and how hard to blow the clouds. Also setting up the tripod.

The storm wheel is a thin, black, 4-foot-diameter disc with a glass face. The disc is filled with water and a small amount of very fine white sand. It's mounted at about a 70-degree angle to the floor, and you can spin it as fast as you want in either direction. We like to let all the sand fall to the bottom and then we rotate it 180-degrees so the sand is at the top. It cascades down in neat ribbed waves. Once the leading wave gets to the middle of the circle, we spin it really fast and all sorts of undulating cloud patterns happen, spiralling into and out of themselves with the rotations of the disc. We shot the second half of the film cartridge on this. Iris was in charge of rotating and stopping the disc while I stood on a stool and held the camera. We even remembered to bring a paper towel soaked with windex to get all the kid handprints off the glass before we shot the footage.

We also did a good amount of goofing around, of course:

It was a good holiday

Iris and Brent, thick as thieves.

Books received

My Christmas haul of literature:

• Joan Retallack's Memnoir
• Claude Royet-Journoud's A Descriptive Method and The Right Wall of the Heart Effaced
• Laura Moriarty's Self-Destruction
• Karen Hines' The Pochsy Plays

Nonetheless, I'm guiltily reading Alice Goldfarb Marquis' biography of Marcel Duchamp, The Bachelor Stripped Bare. Though it's peppered throughout with Freudian moments concerning his mother and his sister Suzanne (also the single shortcoming of Deborah Solomon's stellar bio of Joseph Cornell, Utopia Parkway), it is more objective-yet-speculative than Calvin Tomkins' bio from a few years ago. Marquis consistenly has sentences beginning with the word "perhaps."

I'm going to read Laura's book next. Its first part uses a line of Brent Cunningham's as its epigram:

In its cruelty the mind demands two contradictory things: to hear itself and to escape itself... But even then the mind is vigilant, and begins to see the shadow of its theatrical self.

This is from Brent's Bird & Forest, forthcoming sometime in 2005 from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Brent spent Christmas here with us. We recorded the Christmas Day entry over on Spaceship Tumblers along with Iris.

Some of the last part of "Irresponsibility"

This is, by design, the last part of the book. It's written in and between Philadelphia and Wilmington, NC. It's still really volatile text right now.

Audio excerpt from "Enclosure Play"

This is the only salvagable part of the play, to be honest. The action is discardable.

For beaucoup de poetry audio, click on over to Spaceship Tumblers. The December 19 posting is mine. And more to come.

Sound play, serialized

Here's a single scene from the middle of a piece I've been working on for a while. The piece is either a play or a screenplay or a radio play or a script. In lieu of an identity I am going to serialize it on the blog.

I've narrowed a long list of titles down to three:

• Several New Techniques for Breeding
• The Native Tongues
• The Anteceders

This excerpt is neither from the beginning nor the end.

Saccadic movement

Here's a link to my new favorite chart.

Saccadic movements are the jumpy motions that your eyes make all over a page while you're reading. Here's a creepy link to show saccades during reading. You're gathering constant context data through all these saccades, yet the gestalt amounts to the linear activity of reading, left to right.

Two new reviews over at Goat's Head Soup

I wrote about Tiny Ninja Theater's production of "Macbeth," as well as two video artifacts by Bill Viola and Peter Rose. Read and enjoy.

That Duchamp quotation

The Duchamp note I refer to in the post below is:

Conditions of a language:
The search for "prime words"
(divisible only by themselves and by unity).

or how about this note (Duchamp's emphases):

Take a Larousse dictionary and copy all the so-called "abstract" words, i.e. those which have no concrete reference.
Compose a schematic sign designating each of these words (this sign can be composed with the standard-stops)
These signs must be thought of as the letters of the new alphabet.
A grouping of several signs will determine

(utilize colors---in order to differentiate what would correspond in this [literature] to the substantive, verb, adverb declensions, conjugations etc.)

Necessity for ideal continuity. i.e.: each grouping will be connected with the other groupings by a strict meaning (a sort of grammar, no longer requiring a sentence construction. But, apart from the differences of languages, and the "figures of speech" peculiar to each language---; weighs and measures some abstractions of substantives, of negatives, of relations of subject to verb etc, by means of standard-signs.
(representing these new relations: conjugations, declensions, plural and singular, adjectivation inexpressible by the concrete alphabetic forms of languages living now and to come.).
This alphabet very probably is only suitable for the description of this picture.

Interesting how the first part cuts off in the middle of a sentence---the group of signs will determine... what? So here's what I follow:

1. You take the dictionary's abstract words and use the standard stoppages to come up with another symbol to replace each word.
2. These new symbols (each one re-representing a word) are considered letters of a new alphabet.
3. These letters could be color-coded to convey the part of speech of the original abstract word.
4. A grouping of several of these symbols is a new "word." Each symbol is a letter, so they're a word when grouped. But a word meaning/representing what, exactly?
This is the point where I might no longer follow Duchamp.
5. When these new words are placed one after the other they relate in a grammatical way, but not in a syntactical way.
6. It's an abstracted grammar, perhaps with some patterns or tendencies that correspond analogously to conventional grammatical relationships between words like conjugations, subject and verb, and so forth.
7. These new relationships between words, and the new rules of abstracted grammar that would arise through their usage, could allow expression of something that conventional language cannot approach.
8. I take the last sentence as an admission of the self-referentiality of this abstracted grammar, which Duchamp considers the aesthetic possibilities of.

This system is hard to conceive of, but I think about how when two people stand next to each other they could be "read" like two consecutive words in a sentence. Their meanings and the significance of their situational relationship at a particular moment could be read grammatically. For Duchamp it's an aesthetic semiotics, a way out of painting, a way of "putting painting at the service of the mind rather than the eye," to paraphrase him. Lots of potential for poets here.

Seriality and numbering

Last night I called Ken Rumble because I had what I thought was a good idea about renumbering the poems in my ongoing book MS "Irresponsibility." Right now the book has 9 parts that are labelled with the places&dates where that group of poems was written. Within each part the poems are numbered consecutively, starting each part over again with the number 1. Pretty basic.

I've been looking at this book so much that I've become blind to certain characteristics of it, so I'm trying hard to see it anew. So yesterday I was thinking about the numbering, which was one of the first assumed characteristics of this project from the start, over two years ago.

Four years ago I wrote a different book MS that has since been discarded. It was serial poems as well, but lacked parts. In it I numbered the poems from start to finish, using only prime numbers. So instead of 1 through 10 I had 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 and so forth. I got the idea from a Duchamp note about trying to find the "prime words" in the dictionary. It captures an atomic idea of essentiality, indivisibility, and so forth. Since the demise of that MS I've always wanted to number some serial work with prime numbers.

So yesterday I realized that "Irresponsibility" was an opportunity to use that idea. I thought I could start at 1 with the first poem in the book, and run the numbers consecutively through the end of the book, not starting over at 1 with each location's part. The MS has 70 poems right now, so the current last poem would be numbered with a rather impressive 347. Not trusting myself, I called Ken to ask if this was a good idea or one of those ideas that you regret a couple of days later and have to undo. We listed pros and cons of the idea in our conversation.

Pros:
1. 347 is a rather impressive number. And it would be in the 400s at least by the time I'm done with the book.
2. Since the numbering would run through the whole book, it would unify the project as a whole. Numerically, right now, the parts are discrete.
3. Prime numbers have that indivisibility that I mentioned earlier. To my mind this keys in with essentialism and the Periodic Table, which are both touched on here and there in the poems. Duchamp's idea is really pretty important to me in an everyday way.
4. I wouldn't have to worry about getting around to using this numbering idea anymore, or fearing someone else using it first. Ah, probably someone has already done it anyway. This is a pretty dumb reason and I'm a ashamed of it, but it's there.

Cons:
1. In some places in the poems I refer to other poems by their numbers. Though this could easily be updated.
2. The parts lose some of their discreteness. In the case of a couple of parts, this is a significant loss. A couple of the parts end at a kind of logical endpoint which actually necessitated stopping writing right there. The prime paradigm would overrun that.
3. It's such a gaudy thing that the new numbers could recontextualize the entire book as being about prime numbers. Primes could be the lens through which the entire book would be read. It would be "that prime number book." This is an arrogant way of thinking---it assumes that this will be a book someday and that someone will read it---but whatever.

Ken and I also discussed and nixed the ideas of having no numbers at all (which seemed to me like walking out of the house naked) or doing the Wittgenstein/car-repair-manual numbering with 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 in the first part and then 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 in the second part and so forth. I really didn't see too much of a difference between the 1.1 numbering and the way things are numbered now. Didn't want to reference Wittgenstein in this way either, though my project owes a lot to his work (and the St. Augustine quotation that W's Philosophical Investigations opens with is referenced twice in the poems).

In the end, Ken and I figured that we would keep the numbering as-is. The clincher was the fear that the entire book would be recontextualized within the idea of prime numbers. Level heads prevailed, I think. The numbers aren't organizationally important beyond the confines of each part, and have no conceptual important at all. Maybe I'll list the first 1000 prime numbers as an appendix in the book, if the thing is ever published.

Eric Baus' "Something Else the Music Was"

I just posted a short review of "Something Else the Music Was" by Eric Baus on the Goat's Head Soup blog. It's the latest chapbook off Noah Eli Gordon's Braincase Press.

Thanks, Noah, for sending it to me.

Splicefilm

Off and on for five years I have been working on a super-8 film. It's about 8 minutes long and consists of about 70 shots. At times I have thought of it as a loop, though currently it is linear. It's essentially a Markov Chain film (narrative film generally makes me anxious), but I call it Splicefilm.

The basic idea behind the project was that each shot is analogous to a line of, or phrase from, a poem or piece of writing, and that I could therefore apply an idiosyncratic poetics to film composition. I would just use the same formal decision-making tactics that I would use for something like breaking lines or determining syntax. And I would use the same conceptual decision-making processes I would use for placing sentences and ideas in proximity to each other to choose specific shots, figure out where to cut them, and figure out what other shots go before and after.

Since I don't shoot that much film myself, and am anyway a poor and indecisive cameraperson, I collected films from junk stores, inherited unwanted reels from friends, bought cheap campy shorts off eBay and educational films from school and library sales, even found footage in a cardboard box on the sidewalk in San Francisco. La distance. I viewed all this stuff obsessively so that I could memorize it and have the entirety of this footage in my head, losing as much of its original context as possible. The plan was that if I could incremetally reduce the footage to imagery then themes and resonances would arise and juxtapositions would occur at the level of image not reference. Yes, I'm dreaming the impossible dream here.

Anyway then I would just take notes on it all and then do recomposition (selecting clips and putting them in a certain order) in notebooks. So I started filling pages in notebooks with numbered lists of shots, like this (click to enlarge):


Two years of sporadic work happened solely in notebooks before I took scissors to film (there were some stretches of months where I actually forgot about the project entirely. I can be stupid like that). Once I had an order set, with some gaps to be filled and points of indecision to be figured out later, I spliced the film together. I decided that the order would be "set" when I had selected every duration of imagery that was interesting or useful or resonant to me, and had placed it after another bit and before another bit with a reason for doing so particular to just that splice and nothing else. This is the Markov Chain part: shot 2 follows from shot 1, and shot 3 follows from shot 2, but shots 1 and 3 have no deterministic relationship other than their places in an overall consecutivity. Like how, say, my 8th birthday party happened before today but can't be said to have determined who I am or what I am doing today.

What has ended up happening is not that my poetics informed this film. Instead, working on this film has obsolesced what had been my poetics.

Here are a bunch of stills from the film, in no particular order:

solid arm


arm with veins


head with brain


man with carousel


cogs


Lennart Nilsson embryo


gull


hand putting key into keyhole


unlocking the door


solid head


closed heart valve


open heart valve


carousel horse eye


blur houses


lion, upside down


man in evening jacket


math boxes


night traffic


sidewinder


starfish close-up


stoplight


trees


same trees


ultrasound of Iris

Some more red rectangles

Chris Murray posted some poems from some of her students, including a couple of red rectangle efforts. Check them out.

+++

I've been working hard on the ms of this book of poems called "Irresponsibility." It consists of several parts of numbered poems. No poem is more than about 20 lines. And then I wrote a long one just recently, and will be adding to it. I feel like I'm really drawing a line in the sand here, so to speak. Here's some of it:
(the double-slashes are literal, by the way. you'll have to take my word that I was doing that notation before reading Olivier Cadiot, who uses intraline symbols similarly. rather, I use them similarly to him. anyway.)

Grackles bathe where the drainage
terminates // A typical
move // A pull // Pulling
Between me and the low winter sun
Before the low winter sun
their splashes illuminate

He leaf-blows in church clothes

Grackles splash in a fray
where water pools in the drain divot
behind which the sun sets
My position makes this what it appears // My position makes this
appearance // Position makes this // Giving
up is never correct
The whitespace is made negative // Choosing
Event-specific sets of by what
The oak leaves appear brassy
Undoing

The grate has sunken askew // Here’s why // Gerunds are now
That school addition is unornamented and, in backlit shadow,
flat

Iris and Gracie console imaginary horses
A storm threatens // They argue
beneath that lopsided oak
Win it word by word is problematic

Cadiot: I will do something to someone
The school building rear
looks like a factory contains
also is a factory // Is
Not an implication but a containing
All of his behavior appears portioned and metaphorical
to me as
if he thinks he is being read

A container contained by what it contains
What’s in Firdos Square now?
Argument is the game
It

Grackles bathe and drink in
a drainage pool
Winter sun setting linear behind

These two things, but one thing

Making an argument is a surface

Exploitation is instructive

This coat does nothing

I know that the dogwood is completely red
though I cannot see it from here

Arafat’s dead // So’s Michelle

What’s different now?
versus Can the written be taken back?
Only the parts of his body that
he needs move // He does exactly one thing
Miles Davis “Paraphernalia”

The grackles, the water, their splashing, the sunlight
through the splashing
I’m in the plenum too

Iris and Gracie try the swings again
Event is experience-determined duration

The container, the surface, the contents, the
whitespace, the characteristics, the durations attached to these

Hocquard: Does writing allow someone to see better?
Pursuit is pushing and we have
those two words // Little gravelly hill
is one way of saying
little gravelly hill
Once you demarcate the items, how different do you want them to be?

The saturated soil sank to make an unintentional berm

Iris tells Theresa to say “No, no it isn’t”
The equipment is geometric and what isn’t?
Cobra is a system not a composition

That lopsided oak likely lost its crown in ice storms
Albiach: would their word be transmitted
Iris guesses pronunciation at vowels
A signal is a sub-signal // The difference between this with this and this without this

Returning to the grackles is
different from returning to Firdos Square // Displacing a
symmetry with another symmetry
Royet-Journoud: eye pursues its prey / shelters behind another phrase
The Fallujah offensive is replay and slow-motion
Bettis’s subtlety
Evie’s rectangle

The coverage of the taxi explosion
shows the exploded taxi

Until she gets it right

Nothing elapses right now

Vicki calls from earlier in time

The cartoons did their jobs and were declared heroes

The magical rain brings the tree to life

Neither plenum nor vacuum is a negation

I’m getting tough // Poetry is invisible

The red dogwood leaves hang directly at the ground
in angled clusters around the base of the
nude depleted buds // These clusters as a whole have a shape

The Periodic Table lapses into abomination
One name is as good as another
Amber’s detachment
Minimal and essential, snakes
The projector completely blocks out the light source between each frame
Nothing haphazard and I don’t expect
the dots to be connected // Iris says
“The pinks almost rhyme”

Snakes do
not elaborate

Sunset is a lie

By naming the suspension of judgment you
are missing the point
There were no single grackles // Are
The understood it
Grackles is singular

Each dogwood leaf is mottled with blacks, browns, and reds // Veins
are yellowish implying the green they were in spring
Lack of end-punctuation is a characteristic
of this sentence // Characteristic has of
I agree they’re red

Actually they’re starlings

The noun is a process